The Bowery—Delectable New Book Offers Great Pix and Juicy Tidbits

By Phyllis Eckhaus

Touted in 1896 as “the alivest mile on the face of the earth” the Bowery is so much more than New York City’s oldest street. And now there’s The Bowery, a delightful book that proves it, making the case that this once notorious thoroughfare is the urban version of Route 66, an extraordinary artery of American history and culture.

The Bowery is a delicious treat, an ice cream cone for fans of urban lore. This slender volume—published in May as part of the Images of America series put out by Arcadia Publishing—honors “America’s first entertainment district” by being tremendous fun to peruse. Packed with splendid photos and illustrations, it’s a cornucopia of surprising history, breezily recounted via visuals, captions and brief text replete with telling, human-interest details.

But author David Mulkins, the president of the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors, has a serious point lurking behind all the juicy tidbits he serves up: The Bowery isn’t just fun facts, it’s important. Six chapters underscore the street’s significance.

Chapter One, “The Architecture, Commerce, and People,” recalls history and historic edifices, as well as significant businesses. The area was home to a settlement of free Blacks, set up by the Dutch as a buffer to protect the Dutch from Native American attack. George Washington feted the evacuation of the British with a celebratory march along the Bowery. An 1805 Bowery hotel—now the SoHotel—still operates. A lace and silk emporium pioneered shorter hours for its 150 women workers. Then-Bowery-based gadget store Hammacher Schlemmer launched its still-extant catalogue in 1848. Famous Bowery tattoo artists patented new tools as they practiced their craft.

Chapter Two, “New York City’s First Entertainment District,” is the heart of the book—so rich it could easily be expanded into its own volume. In the 1700s, the street hosted horse races and bull and bear-baiting. Till the mid-1800s it was home to Vauxhall Garden, with its open air theater—nestled among gravel walks and greenery—offering concerts, plays, fireworks, and hot-air balloon launches.

Later affordable entertainment for the working class included “3,000-seat theaters, zoos, circuses, dime museums, tattoo parlors, photography studios, concert saloons, boxing saloons, Mozart in beer gardens, opera, dance halls, billiard halls, skating rinks, oyster bars, shooting galleries, and gambling dens” as well as drag shows, burlesque and vaudeville.

The Bowery Theater, beloved by Walt Whitman for its democratic mixing of classes, featured America’s first ballet performance in 1827 (a Frenchwoman shockingly in tights!). In 1872, it offered the first stage appearance of Wild Bill Cody. It’s where a local turned international star—William Henry Lane, known as “Master Juba: King of All Dancers”—pioneered tap dance, which fused African and Irish dance traditions and arose out of the neighborhood’s competitive challenge dances. The Bowery Theater also performed Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which premiered elsewhere on the street in 1852.

In the 1880s, the Bowery birthed vaudeville—variety theater without booze and bawdiness—enabling women and children to attend. Miner’s Bowery Theater was the first to deploy a shepherd’s crook to force lousy entertainers off the stage. Its “amateur night” launched actor-comedian-singer-songwriter-dancer Eddie Cantor, who coined both the name and the idea of the “March of Dimes”—which garnered mass contributions to end polio.

Among the fun photos is an impossibly young, skinny W.C. Fields performing as a juggler in a Bowery dime museum, balls in hand and aloft. Then there’s “Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy,” advertised by the dime museums as a wild man. A Russian whose hypertrichosis gave him a furry face, Feydor Jeftichew spoke three languages, was highly paid and “nobody’s fool.”

The Bowery’s vitality and grit drew crowds. “The street itself was a theatrical attraction” Mulkins observes, alive with everything from clowns, musicians, hot corn girls and German oompah bands to gangs, gays, pickpockets, painted ladies and “slumming parties.”

Chapter Three portrays “The Street of Forgotten Men,” the Bowery’s history as a hellhole crowded with the down-and-out—disabled veterans, and alcoholic and mentally ill men. “It is amazing, even heroic,” Mulkins suggests, “that one street could bear such a multitude of suffering and desolation.” A Depression-era photo shows a dense row of lodging houses offering beds for 20 cents and rooms for 40 cents. By contrast, “flophouses” offered just space on the floor. Mulkins selects photos with discernment. This chapter doubles as a survey of photographers and filmmakers inspired by the seamy side of the street.

Chapter Four, “The Bowery in Literature, Song, Film and the Imagination,” offers more delectable pop culture nuggets. For example, the original Bowery Boys, “the strutting peacocks of gangland” who also fought fires, were—like today’s rap artists—admired and emulated for their swaggering style. They inspired a hit 1848 play. By the 20th century the Bowery Boys were represented in softened form, “comical, tough-talkin’, movie goofballs” appearing in dozens of films over decades, the last in 1958. A further fun fact: Mae West’s 1933 hit, She Done Him Wrong, her homage to the Bowery, launched her movie career, Cary Grant, and fierce backlash resulting in a crushing movie censorship code.

Chapter Five, “Bowery Arts and Artists from 1950 through the Present,” notes that once the Third Avenue elevated train came down in 1956, the area became a magnet for cutting-edge artists seeking light, space, and cheap rent. Music history was made. During the fifties and sixties, the Five Spot jazz club on Cooper Square allowed Billie Holiday to perform without the cabaret license she’d lost; it was where saxophonist Ornette Coleman introduced free jazz. Mulkins also lingers on beloved lost CBGB, which birthed punk rock. The Talking Heads performed their future hit Psycho Killer there in 1975, while opening for the Ramones, supposedly before an audience of just ten people.

Chapter Six, “Social, Political, and Intellectual Ferment,” concludes the book with stories of unrest and change, not surprising given the Bowery’s epic clash of social classes. Here Mulkins includes the nation-shaking orations at Cooper Union’s Great Hall and the Astor Place Riot, as well as Elizabeth Jennings’ precedent-setting 1857 lawsuit to integrate mass transit after she was violently thrown off a Bowery trolley car for being Black. I knew of these things—as well as the Green Guerrillas’ revolutionary 1973 reclamation of a garbage-strewn Bowery lot, “seed-bombing” it to transform it into the city’s first community garden. But it is a measure of Mulkins’ wonderful nerdy obsessiveness that he has amazing stories almost no one else would know—such as how the body of abolitionist martyr John Brown, hanged for his 1859 raid to free slaves at Harpers Ferry, was secretly detoured and embalmed by an abolitionist Bowery undertaker.

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New York City history fans will love The Bowery, a smorgasbord in contrast to this mere snack of a review. The book also makes a great gift. Profits support the desperately-needed preservation efforts of the Bowery Alliance of Neighbors. The Bowery is available from local bookstores, including Village Works on Saint Mark’s Place, and can be ordered online from Arcadia Publishing.